“... of all a sort of symbiotic state of the poet’. Others were less tolerant. The short story writer Peter Taylor, also Jarrell’s close friend, remembered him at Vanderbilt as treating almost everybody badly, from arrogance rather than conceit. Another student recalled that he was preternaturally bright, and ‘knew everything’. Those who know too much are ...”

“... American style’, the style of the new sculpture gallery in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Pope was subsequently chosen as the architect of the National Gallery of Art in Washington and was also responsible for the design of the Duveen Gallery for the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum (not, as Spalding claims, destroyed in the Second World War ...”

“... national hero Charles Lindbergh. He’d been ‘beloved’ to her when he’d flown solo from New York to Paris; but he’d taken to headlining rallies to defend the Neutrality Act against the ‘British and Jewish races’ who would ‘lead our country to destruction’. He was the American Thompson most feared, ‘America’s number one problem ...”

“... for’ … Then he said to me: ‘Well you told me about playing on the avant-garde scene in New York. Why don’t you try something like that?’ I said: ‘Are you serious?’ He said: ‘Absolutely.’ That whole solo was one shot, one take – boom, that was it. But it came about because he got it out of me. Throughout Starman, Trynka emphasises this ...”

“... A friend​ who teaches in New York told me that the historian Peter Lake told him that J.G.A. Pocock told him that Conrad Russell told him that Bertrand Russell told him that Lord John Russell told him that his father the sixth Duke of Bedford told him that he had heard William Pitt the Younger speak in Parliament during the Napoleonic Wars, and that Pitt had this curious way of talking, a particular mannerism that the sixth Duke of Bedford had imitated to Lord John Russell who imitated it to Bertrand Russell who imitated it to Conrad Russell who imitated it to J ...”

“... it might signal the end of ‘this great martyrdom which brought to her aid half of literary New York’. About these affairs people usually say such things. What interests at this distance is the clarity with which the two women stand out, and how shadowy is the figure of the man. He could vanish into the vagueness of his poetry like a squid into its ...”

“... Derry, whose mistresses and profane talk made the English colony shun him; Henry Cardinal, Duke of York, brother to Charles Edward, at 78 ‘still uncommonly handsome, with the freshness of youth in his cheeks’; and finally the Pope, whose toe Margaret and Katherine were all agog to kiss, when he ‘by a motion of his hand dispensed us from the ...”

“... a fine biography precede the completion of her own. O Pioneers! was praised by a critic in the New York Times for creating ‘a new mythology’. As O’Brien points out, she replaced the traditional American hero with three heroines, Alexandra, Maria and the land, and, in the words of a home-town reviewer, offered a most suitable prose for the ...”

“... living (to put the places in roughly chronological order), in London, Paris, Spain, Hollywood, New York, Antwerp, Montreux, Bologna, Basle, Brussels, Lausanne and the Hague. In 1953 she returned to London because she was, as she put it, ‘losing her English’.An Australian, then, but an expatriate; an international writer who insisted she could find subjects ...”

“... when he’s not saving the West from the threat of a new caliphate in the pages of the New York Times, believes that ‘questions about values – about meaning, morality and life’s larger purpose – are really questions about the well-being of conscious creatures.’ Our advancing understanding of the brain will, he believes, help us to arrive at ...”

“... going to happen at all, it was most likely during the futurist frenzy of the early 20th century. Peter Vergo, in The Music of Painting, examines a neglected aspect of the modernist era, when a variety of painters, poets, composers and inventors became preoccupied with the convergence of visual and aural stimuli – a utopian race towards a future of total ...”

“... that there was order behind the apparent chaos. While Robert Moses was proposing to carve up New York to make way for the car and expressway she called for the rich process of interaction that defined the city to be nurtured rather than destroyed. She envisaged a large residential population living in mixed-use developments, with shops fronting streets to ...”

“... steady, well-connected, a pillar of Moat County society. The brothers’ problems recall those of Peter Flood, the protagonist of Brotherly Love (1992), this novel’s immediate and much-praised predecessor. Peter, like Ward, is a masochist (in addition to boxing, a Dexter passion, he likes jumping off rooftops), with an ...”

“... the continuing hegemony of the family as it is about sex. Samantha, who sleeps her way around New York’s rich and famous, sits in a Manhattan cocktail bar. The camera follows her gaze as she looks over to a table in the corner, where Donald Trump is sitting with another businessman: ‘Listen Ed, I’ve gotta go, but think about it.’ ‘Samantha, a ...”

“... on. This was just one of the domestic surprises that came in the wake of 11 September. Another was Peter Mandelson’s strangely off-key suggestion that the secret services should be recruiting in Bradford rather than St James’s (apparently on the grounds that immigrants would find it easier than Old Etonians to disguise themselves as Islamic ...”